Franklin Einspruch’s essay about Elisabeth Condon’s show at MIA Galleries in November 2018

TO KNOW ELISABETH CONDON is to understand the magnitude of the art that she holds in her head. I write head wishing that English had an equivalent of 心, the amalgam of the heart, spirit, mind, cognition, and experience that the Chinese pronounce xin.

The paintings on view in her exhibition at Miami International Airport are the product of eight years of studio labor. Included in that time is a residency schedule that would crush a lesser artist. She painted from Loleta, California to Saratoga Springs, New York, and from Sheridan, Wyoming to the Florida Everglades. There were forays to Cadaqués and Shanghai as well. All the while she took in visual experience like a whale takes in plankton from the ocean.

This has always been her way. As the rebellious teenage daughter of a conservative Angeleno family, she wallowed in chemically-enhanced fascination with the wallpaper with which her mother bedecked the house. The making of pattern and the making of meaning thus became permanently linked in her psyche. Those impulses are filtered through a sensitivity to material that we associate with high modernism – an enjoyment of paint as paint. That is to say, a completely contradictory impulse that does not readily support either pattern or image, and certainly doesn’t support them both at the same time.

This has all the makings of a kind of internal religious war. Indeed, Condon spent years alternating between straightforward abstraction and painterly figuration before acting on a hunch that a resolution lay within the Asian tradition. Travels to Beijing and Taichung in the mid-2000s allowed her to explore a mode of making that was familiar enough to offer a way in, but distant enough to initiate a creative reset. Figurative elements of Chinese art come out of a practice of copying, not unlike the method by which one makes patterns. Abstract elements of Chinese art, its concern with effective use of empty space, its regard of the density and handling of ink as a topic of contemplation in itself, closely track with the challenges of mid-20th century American abstraction.